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Drama of a Technological Society

Let me start with a few general comments on this essay and maybe get into more detail in a later poest.

Mike Hubler's piece on the intersection between Jacques Ellul and KB on technology is brilliant. It rewards a careful reading. I highly recommend it.

One thing Hubler emphasizes that stood out for me is the ambiguity inherent in the agent-agency "inversion" he speaks of, the way in which technology, construed as "obviously" an agency in our gadget-overloaded world, is, from another angle and by way of contrast, seemingly in the saddle and riding humankind at an incredible gallop. Consequently, the fluidity of the pentadic terms and concepts can just as easily render "technique" as agent in a straight agent-agency correspondence, with the symbol-using/misusing animal as the tool of his or her mechanized creations.

Hubler makes that ambiguity clear, with supportive references to passages in Burke. In fact, he employs Burke's own descriptions to nicely justify that kind of agent-agency construction, with the machine as autonomous slave-driver and pentadically named as such. His central use of Burke's dramatism as a way of more explicitly rhetoricizing Ellul's half-century-old critique of our modern infatuation with the machine is thus appropriately nuanced and pellucidly parsed.

Here's another point Hubler makes that should seem obvious, but that is conspicuously missing in virtually all Burkean scholarship: the interdependence of Burke's "grammar" and grammar in the prosaic sense of the term. Our author says:

"The pentad maps a kind of 'grammar' that is implicit in the way humans act with symbols, and is analogous to the grammar that governs the way sentences are constructed."

Hey, Burke didn't invent act, scene, agent, agency, purpose, and attitude. These notions are inherent in the definitions of the content parts of speech. What Burke has done is elucidate how the entelechial dimension of symbol-usage, the "magical" glow of one perfected ideal, has seduced "homo loquax" into believing that one term, or one set of associated terms, says it all, subordinates every other notion or cause, in any given instance.

I like, too, the subtlety with which Hubler treats machines, our technological inventions, as possibly and mysteriously occupying some no-man's land somewhere between action and motion. He states:

"Burke's distinction between action and motion might be creatively used as an alternative rhetorical interpretation of the autonomy of technique. While Burke generally only classifies humans as species of action, and relegates technologies to the realm of motion, at different places he also suggests that the relationship might be turned on its head in the same way that agent-agency is inverted."

Whatever those artifactual instruments are that "separate [us] from [our] natural condition," they're not easily equated with the wind, rain, tides, and the four forces of physics. It's still an open question, I believe, how we label those artifacts in terms of the action/motion axis of oppositions.

I want to examine later the way Ellul so prophetically gets into all of this, according to our insightful author.

Taxonomy upgrade extras:

Still conjuring up random thoughts in response to Hubler's fine essay---maybe I'll wax more coherent later.

This is an excellent state-of-the-art piece, as I see it, a well-wrought synthesizing, summarizing article. Its featured claim is not eye-poping news. The assertion that, Frankenstein-like, our machines have taken over our lives, are driving us like cattle or sheep who knows where, and that we can best characterize the motivations involved, Burke-wise, by inverting an agent-agency ratio seems pretty tame in and of itself. What's arresting about this essay is the richness of its splicing together of so many fitting strands of thought and research, the revealing analogue produced by juxtaposing Ellul and Burke, and the unerring precision and, I dare say, eloquence with which Hubler explains each concept and relationship along the way. A reader can learn, or be well refreshed on, a lot of Burkology via "The Drama of a Technological Society."

I'm wondering whether the source of the ambiguity about what pentadic term Burke, or a Burkean, customarily uses, or should use, in reference to human technologies isn't cleared up a bit by something Overington noted, and I think rightly so, that sometimes Burke isn't exactly clear whether he's referring to language-use or the artifacts and/or morally purposeful motions that language-use generates. Dramatism as fundamentally a critique or philosophy of language is, for instance, blurred a bit by Burke's definition of the "basic unit of drama" in GM: It is the "human body in [morally] purposeful motion."

Anyway, when Hubler quotes Burke as referring to machines essentially as "agencies," Burke seems pretty obviously to be referring to artifacts, not to terminologies. Linguistically, those machines can be construed as any pentadic thing whatsoever: an agent that shapes modern humankind's day from morning to night, constraining scene for contemporary decision-making, the act of a whole host of inventive geniuses, or the purposive be-all and end-all of twenty-first-century planning. When we're concretely using them, we tend to think of our gadgets as means of some kind, even when they have surreptitiously taken over our life.

The ambiguity between the "thing" and the symbolization of the "thing" extends to questions of motivation as well. There's motivation in the featuring of the term "guns" in a discourse, to be sure. There is also, without a doubt, a strong motivational pull in a ubiquitous availability of guns in a culture like our own. "People kill people," yes. But so do "guns." They "argue" for a certain strategy for settling disputes.

Of the many bases Hübler touches upon, as well as those you do, I wanted to take a moment and focus on this one: “Here's another point Hübler makes that should seem obvious, but that is conspicuously missing in virtually all Burkean scholarship: the interdependence of Burke's ‘grammar’ and grammar in the prosaic sense of the term.”

This interdependence is, I believe, especially important when we’re considering the agent-agency inversion between scientists and technology. Do scientists create the information we need to build technology, or does the technology create the scientist? Strangely, the formulaic grammar of technical journals would seem to imply the latter, just as Burke’s “grammar” gives us a means of discussing this inversion.

Technical journals are dominated by passive voice. And passive voice erases the grammatical subject, the entity analogous to the Burkean agent. (The subject of a sentence and the agent of the pentad both perform the action.) By inverting the grammatical structure of the language and bringing forth the object (or the agency, if you prefer), these journals also invert the agent-agency ratio. No longer do people perform actions; instead, the motions of the experiment are described as if no human agent were involved. This language creates an illusion of objectivity. If the experiment exists without human agents, it also exists without bias or error. But this perfect lack of bias is possible only with motion, never with action, which implies a purpose and therefore a potential bias.

Again, more later. As you mention, Hübler’s piece touches a lot of bases.

Edit: After posting what you've seen so far, I realized that I haven't been reading many technical journals lately, and I didn't have any good examples of the inversion I mention here. So I stopped by my college library this morning and picked out a journal more or less at random: The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, January 2002. The first article in it is "Acute Total Hip Arthroplasty for Selected Displaced Acetubular Fractures." Yep, sounds technical.

Here's the first sentence that caught my eye: "Younger individuals with nonosteopenic bone were treated with an Anatomic or Multilock uncemented stem" (3). I have no idea what nonosteopenic bone is, but I know what passive voice is, and this is it. The individuals were treated, but the study doesn't say who treated them. To read the sentence, you get the impression that they weren't treated by people, but by technology: the Anatomic or Multilock uncemented stem. Again, we see the grammatical inversion that reflects the agent-agency inversion. Compare that with "I treated the patients who had nonosteopenic bone," and you see quite a different implication.

So here I thought I was making a thoughtful, original point about passive voice in technical journals, something that I could add to a paper sometime in the near future. And then I read "Does Rhetoric of Science Matter? The Case of the Floppy‑Eared Rabbits," by Alan Gross, in College English 53 (1991): 933‑41. Gross comments:

The regular use of the passive voice in scientific prose is now easily explained: it is a routine grammatical means for making physical objects and events the subjects of scientific sentences. No matter that the passive is an alternative voice that cannot be used consistently without some clumsiness. The stylistic devices of scientists are not gaucherie; they reflect in language the world as meant by science.

Bleh. So much for my efforts. To make matters worse, consider this line from my blog:

I don't mean to imply that the description above applies to all writing about science. Popular science writers, such as Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, and Alan Lightman, present science as an essentially humanistic activity. People perform experiments. The action is clear.

And who does Gross choose as an example of a science writer? Lewis Thomas. Yeah, my first thought for an example, too. I thought it might be interesting to compare his popular writing with his scientific papers. I was right, as Gross very ably demonstrates.

On a similar note, Gross quotes Roland Barthes as saying that "the absence of rhetorical signifiers constitutes in its turn a stylistic signifier." Gross observes that this means scientific journals are "hardly free from rhetorical effect" (934). Compare that with this, from the blog entry I mention above:

Scientific journals contain writing that is self-consciously "antirhetorical"—that is, it avoids rhetorical devices that could lead to an appearance of bias.

This avoidance, however, is itself a rhetorical device.

That's simply eerie. If I found this sort of thing in my students' writing, I'd suspect plagiarism. But I'm sure I hadn't read this article until today.

Oh, well. Now I'm off to think of a new idea that I won't find the moment I read another article.

Still conjuring up random thoughts in response to Hubler's fine essay---maybe I'll wax more coherent later.

This is an excellent state-of-the-art piece, as I see it, a well-wrought synthesizing, summarizing article. Its featured claim is not eye-poping news. The assertion that, Frankenstein-like, our machines have taken over our lives, are driving us like cattle or sheep who knows where, and that we can best characterize the motivations involved, Burke-wise, by inverting an agent-agency ratio seems pretty tame in and of itself. What's arresting about this essay is the richness of its splicing together of so many fitting strands of thought and research, the revealing analogue produced by juxtaposing Ellul and Burke, and the unerring precision and, I dare say, eloquence with which Hubler explains each concept and relationship along the way. A reader can learn, or be well refreshed on, a lot of Burkology via "The Drama of a Technological Society."

I'm wondering whether the source of the ambiguity about what pentadic term Burke, or a Burkean, customarily uses, or should use, in reference to human technologies isn't cleared up a bit by something Overington noted, and I think rightly so, that sometimes Burke isn't exactly clear whether he's referring to language-use or the artifacts and/or morally purposeful motions that language-use generates. Dramatism as fundamentally a critique or philosophy of language is, for instance, blurred a bit by Burke's definition of the "basic unit of drama" in GM: It is the "human body in [morally] purposeful motion."

Anyway, when Hubler quotes Burke as referring to machines essentially as "agencies," Burke seems pretty obviously to be referring to artifacts, not to terminologies. Linguistically, those machines can be construed as any pentadic thing whatsoever: an agent that shapes modern humankind's day from morning to night, constraining scene for contemporary decision-making, the act of a whole host of inventive geniuses, or the purposive be-all and end-all of twenty-first-century planning. When we're concretely using them, we tend to think of our gadgets as means of some kind, even when they have surreptitiously taken over our life.

The ambiguity between the "thing" and the symbolization of the "thing" extends to questions of motivation as well. There's motivation in the featuring of the term "guns" in a discourse, to be sure. There is also, without a doubt, a strong motivational pull in a ubiquitous availability of guns in a culture like our own. "People kill people," yes. But so do "guns." They "argue" for a certain strategy for settling disputes.

I want to say something now about the intersection of Jacques Ellul's thought and that of Burke that Hubler features in his essay.

We might tend today to think of Ellul as being prophetic. His book on LA TECHNIQUE was completed by 1950 and was published in 1955. Mid-20th-century Western societies were, however, extremely technological. They have just grown that much more so, along with third-world cultures, during the intervening decades. Our machines were riding us pretty hard even back then. They're simply more imperious still in our digital age.

Under the larger heading of what Ellul calls "technical intention," Hubler cites three Ellulian terms that epitomize what modern technololgy is doing to industrial nations and the worldview or ideological climate that forms rhetorical contexts.
These trends or concepts are "autonomy," "technical necessity," and "demystification."

"Technical intention" simply means our tools, machines, and methodological processes "ironically" become an "end, rather than a means to perpetuate [traditionally human] social or individual goals." This shift in priorities leads to the "autonomy" of "every method and technological invention," whereby "each technique seems to follow its own efficient course without regard to its positive or negative effects." It "deflect[s] human moral concerns." It results in a "moral autonomy."

"Technology [then] grows expnentially and irreversibly" out of "necessity." The tech worldview fosters "the belief that whatever can be produced must be produced . . . , pushing the boundaries of the possible without concern for practical consequences." It assumes the need for "advancement for its own sake."

In tar baby fashion, "Each technique tends to create problems that can only be addressed by introducing new technologies," leading to a "cycle of problem solving/creating inventions."

Finally, tech culture "demystifies the sacred value of every part of society except LA TECHNIQUE." "Purpose" having been folded back into "means," "the only sacred left in a technological society is LA TECHNIQUE itself. And it is embraced with near dogmatic and perhaps naive faith sometimes expressed in the belief that 'whenever a difficulty arises, technical progress will deal with it.'"

Ellul's formulation resonates well with Burke's dramatism/logology, I do believe, with one possible exception, and that exception is a significant one.

Viewing the "autonomy" of the machine, "follow[ing] its own efficient course," as problematic, like Ellul, I think of Burke's great proto-comic manifesto in COUNTER-STATEMENT. It appears in the chapter "Program." There Burke contrasts "practical" folks (the bad guys) and "aesthetic Bohemians" (the good guys). The aesthetes are characerized by "inefficiency, indolence, dissipation, vacillation, mockery, distrust, 'hypochondria,' non-conformity, bad sportsmanship, . . . negativism, . . . experimentalism, curiosity, risk, dislike of propaganda, dislike of certainty,---tentative[ness]" (pp. 111-12). This "democrat . . . has no hope in perfection---as the 'opposition,' his [sic] nearest approach to a doctrine is the doctrine of interference" (p. 115).

Burke's "artist" is especially "anti-industrial," anti-"commercial." He or she generates "a babble of discordant voices" to sew "confusion" among the "hero[s] of economic warfare" (pp. 114-15).

Ergo, Burke does offer a sliver of hope, or at least a call to and a program for concerted opposition, in the face of the seemingly inexorable march of technology. Burke summons humankind to perspective by incongruity and dialectical or double vision. He admonishes us to pay attention to all the parliamentary voices, even those of the naysayers. He askes for metareflection on the sometimes siren motives inherent in language itself, particularly those that destructively drive us blindly toward an imagined "necessity" in the working out of our inventions.

How are we Burkophiles shaping up today in our realistic, not just our scholarly, implementation of Burke's call to halfway adequate symbolic action?

From a dramatistic perspective, how fares Ellul's claim that the tech society "demystifies the sacred value of every part of society except LA TECHNIQUE," as Hubler puts it, as these wondrous tools are "embraced with near dogmatic and perhaps naive faith"? Embodying "perfect" agency, Ellul says, our technologies are "exalted," are seen as "sacred."

On first glimmer, such an interpretation sounds thoroughly Burkean. Isn't contemplation of the ways of perfection and mystification/demystification very much a part of what Burke's enterprise is about? A passage from GM Hubler highlights further underscores its dramatistic bona fides:

"And since," Burke says, "the requirements of such science [like that of today, theoretical and applied] favor the elimination of Purpose, or final cause, the means-ends relation provokes a shift to the term nearest of kin [means or agency], which can supply the function of purpose even when the term is formally omitted as a locus of motives."

To make sure we get it, Hubler epitomizes Burke's take thusly: "Applied science as technology is not only an agency-turned-agent, it is a means turned into an end (a[n] [ultimately] purposeless purpose)." "It debunks the sacred by eliminating purpose" in the transcendental sense.

We can even note an analogous phenomenon in the fields of evolutionary science, biological as well as cosmological. The "mystery" of our origins having been stripped away by a seemingly well-supported theory about fortuitous planetary conditions; spontaneous generation of living, membranous cells out of carbon molecutles, peptides, and amino acids; blind chance mutations from generation to generation; and natural selection or deflection of those sudden, randomly appearing traits---this narrative has but reinforced a thousandfold LaPlace's famed reply to the question of where God fitted into his account of Earth's formation: "I have no need of the hypothesis."

There is, therefore, little need to posit and worship a mysterious and transcendent Cause of Everything, since we now know the "cause" of just about everything. The so-called "God of the Gaps" grows dimmer and dimmer as the gaps in our knowledge recede. There's no need to pray to some Power that is presumed to control Everything, because we have pretty much brought everything under our own control via our Wondrously Potent and Versatile Technologies. Sort of like the archaic devotees of the cargo cults, we are constrained to genuflect toward the bounteous artifacts that have made our life so much "better," even if they didn't exactly fall out of the sky as cargo.

One glaring problem surfaces in respect to Ellul's rationale of demystification: He theorized and wrote at mid-century, well before the paradoxes of the postmodern condition presented themselves full force. True, the march of secularization and immanentized thinking has continued unabated. Not, though, without a countervailing and almost equally intense revival of fundamentalist religion of many varieties. Just as we've seen ethnic and nationalistic movements cut across advancing globalization, so have we witnessed near primitive and obscurantist expressions of transcendental faith grow and do fierce battle with the practical agnosticism of the sophisticated. The "sacred" in the traditional sense of the term is vigorously alive in North America, the Middle East, and across the Third World.

What gives? And does Burke have an answer?

He surely does. For although he offers up a fitting and apparently supportive passage in GM for this facet of Ellul's thesis, KB elsewhere makes clear his belief that the "magic spell" of language is "impossible" to break (PLF, pp. 1-8, 119). Transcendencies are ineradicatble in the life of the symbol-using animal (RM). Magic and mystery can only be moderated, not eliminated. A full drama containing mysticism as well as realism, pragmatism, idealism, and materialism will surface across populations, if not in the life of each and every symbol-user. Call it a division of dramatic labor, if you will. Logology postulates theology as its paradigm case. LA TECHNIQUE may seem "perfect," but it's not perfect enough for a being unsettled by the siren call of the infinite-negative of command.

I know Bob Wess and I don't see eye to eye on this matter. We went round and round on it last issue. I think history so far is on my side, and on Burke's, as I read him.

Now, we can surely see Burke's principle of entelechy or motive of perfection at work in Ellul in respect to both "autonomy" and "technical necessity." The quest for ever and ever greater "efficiency," the urgent "prescriptions for action . . . embedded in [our] technological artifacts" (Hubler), and our supine "belief that whatever can be produced must be produced" (Ellul)---all these imperatives of modern TECHNIQUE promote the kind of end-of-the-line thinking Burke describes as a sickness as well as a glory. Burke seems almost as pessimistic about it all as Ellul. Urging "neo-Stoic[ism]," "tolerance," and "resignation" (GM, p. 318), Burke offers this not-too-hopeful assessment at the conclusion of GM:

"For better or worse, men [sic] are set to complete the development of technology, a development that will require such a vast bureaucracy (in both political and commercial administration) as the world has never before encountered" (p. 442).

Burke does caution, though, against the extremes of "fanaticism" and "dissipation" (pp. 318, 442). We don't go down without making an ameliorative effort. We don't grab all the goodies we can for ourselves, while the planet is plundered. Let's develop, Burke admonishes, a "hypochondriacal" interest in the "linguistic factor" that undergirds such self-centered "rottenness" (LASA). And, while w're at it, it might not be a bad idea, also, to move to a farm in Northern New Jersay that does without electricity and indoor plumbing. Let's stay ecologically realistic in the trenches, as well as perceptive above the fray.

Speaking of a "vast bureaucracy," we might note that Ellul's description of "technical necessity" suggests a large dollop of Burke's "bureaucratization of the imaginative." Often "negative"---hey, howabout inevitably negative to one extent or another---unforeseen consequences will complicate the idealistic schemes of the geniuses who invent the stuff that has transformed human lifeways and global ecosystems. Burke offered a glimpse of Ellul's "cycle of problem solving/creating inventions" as early as 1937.

I'd like to address Ellul's notion of "demystification" and its Burkean ambiguities in the next post.

We come to the "so what?" question in respect to Hubler's well-wrought analysis: As rhetoricians, or critics of the symbolic actions of our time and place, what should we be looking for, and why?

Hubler starts his answer to the "so what?" question with this directive: "The dramatistic perspective we are developing here discovers [should surely seek to discover] in the PRESENT SYMBOLIC ACTIVITIES of human beings, a drama of autonomous technologies." More specifically, we are to search out "narratives that elevate the importance of means over the discussion of ends." More pointedly still, we need to take note of discourses that promulgate "the belief that whatever is technically possible must be technically explored," or, as a matter of course, WILL be technically explored whether we like it or not. Be especially attuned to the highlighting of "efficiency" and its synonyms as expressions of Burke's principle of "entelechy" in "all areas of human activity, from the practical to the personal." The assembly line model, after all, inspires "a range of terminologies" within and beyond the office or industrial park. "The compulsion to apply the vocabulary of efficiency," Hubler asserts, "might be the dramatistic equivalent of being driven by technical necessity to invent every method and machine that is possible."

The careful reader, listener, or observer will be on guard for implicit motivational appeals of these kinds, as well as explicit. Hubler cites Reagan's "Star Wars" address and Clinton's appeal to wire all high schools to the internet as examples.

The "wherefore" of such critical vigilance is the maintenance, if possible, of something approaching a sane and humane social order, and, we might add, a biologically viable planet.

Must the symbol-misusing animal go "rotten" to the core? Or is he or she way to "efficient" for that?

I have a question, now, for lurkers and readers, you electronic passers-by: Would you post here a reference to, or brief description of, a discourse, passage, or slogan that gives expression to technological or scientific hegemony in our life and culture? It can express enthusiastic support for, or unconscious assumption of, technical agencies and processes turned ends, our machines and engineering knowhow as ultimat purposes or unstoppable forces that we can only sit by and observe as they work their independent will to some "end of the line." Or, it might be a discourse or passage that laments the imperious march of the machine, or epistemic deflections of our vaunted research programs, decries the loss of "mystery" our truncated terminologies and perspectives have wrought.

On that last score, I think of Walt Whitman's poem about a lecture he attended that filled him with great sadness. True, Whitman was writing near the dawn of the Industrial Age. We've become more calloused and inured to the arid spiritual landscape Melville gazed out upon in horror in the chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale" in MOBY DICK. Anyway, here is Whitman's verse, the first line of which serves as the title:

"When I heard the learned astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars."

One of the most successful movies in recent years about technology gone awry--sort of my generation's Frankenstein--is Jurassic Park. In it, Jeff Goldblum (as Ian) says, "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Incidentally, I wrote a paper on Whitman's poem when I was in high school. At the time, I agreed strongly with the viewpoint expressed there. Why should astronomers (and other scientists) ruin the beauty of their subjects by putting them in "charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them"? Now, I'm not so sure. I think this kind of study can add to the beauty of whatever is being studied--as long as we temper that knowledge with the question of what should be studied.

I think Tom has come up with an excellent example of a critique of "technological necessity," as per Ellul, in his post. And the ambivalence he expresses toward Ellul's cautionary approach (Burke's too) is equally well taken. Burke once said he wasn't totally against the march of the machine. It's the blind, obsessive, "entelechial" obeisance we pay to our inventions that Burke deplored, yet rather pessimistically prophesied (see the conclusion to GM).